


New York City on a Monday

by pinkpines



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), F/M, Future Fic, Living Together, Moving In Together, New York City, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-09-24 04:23:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20352334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkpines/pseuds/pinkpines
Summary: Old fic, writen ages ago to fulfill the following two “I wish you would write…” prompts from my old tumblr:- No but seriously I wish you would write a fic where the twins are moving to New York so that they can be together without people recognizing them and they’re having trouble fitting in- I wish you would write a story where Mabel convinces Dipper to dye his hair.





	New York City on a Monday

“Is this really necessary?”

“Quit moving so much,” Mabel used her left hand to push gently against the side of his jaw so that he was staring straight ahead.

“Is it?” He echoed.

Behind him Mabel smiled secretly, continuing her work of mixing the developer and color into a plastic bowl.

“It couldn’t hurt,” she said finally, once she’d mixed the hair dye to her satisfaction.

“You already have pink hair. It’s not like we’re both walking around with the exact same hair color anymore.” He fidgeted a bit. Whatever she was mixing together smelled atrocious. “Besides, it’s not like we’re identical. We don’t look that much alike. We haven’t since puberty.”

“That’s a fair point, but allow me to remind you that we moved across the country so that we could live life in blissful anonymity in a big city. Even if we’re not identical there’s still a strong resemblance.”

Parting his curly hair down the middle she began to slather on the hair dye with a brush. She worked in small sections, making her way through his hair quickly. It was much easier to dye his than hers had ever been. Even though he was overdue for a cut, dying short hair was infinitely easier.

“I can always tell when someone’s thinking we look sorta similar,” she continued, smothering the concoction onto his hair. His scalp tingled slightly. “They kinda do this thing where they glance back and forth, kinda squinting their eyes a little. Here it’s not as often but… it still happens.”

New York was massive and bustling. They’d only been in their apartment for a couple of months now but he was still getting used to Manhattan. The city seemed alive to Dipper. It had its own rhythm, it seemed to exhale fumes and moan with the sound of police sirens and people shouting in the street as they fell out of pubs and stumbled home.

This was home now, their studio apartment in an ancient tenement building. It was nothing much to look at but it was more about what it signified.

Living here alone meant that Mabel could tug at his hand as they navigated through the ocean of people during rush hour. He could lace his fingers between her smaller ones. She could press her lips to his when they were stumbling out into the cool night’s air after spending hours in a club in Hell’s Kitchen. She could make eyes at him in public, the kind of looks that made his body temperature spike a few degrees. He could slide his hand into the back pocket of her jeans while she wrapped an arm around his waist and pressed against his side enticingly.

They could be together without drawing attention to themselves. Well, without raising suspicion anyway. Mabel was always drawing attention to herself- geographic location be damned.

It meant no more hiding. Which meant that Mabel was just being cautious and protective of this new life they had decided to build together. She didn’t want people to stare too close at their faces, to wonder if they were related, cousins or siblings or anything at all. She wanted to minimize their physical similarities as much as she could- not because she was ashamed, but because this was something precious.

The realization dawned on him slowly. It wasn’t until Mabel was practically finished that it had really sunk in. If all that meant Dipper had to be the kind of guy who dyed his hair- well then he supposed it wasn’t the most terrible thing in the world.

“It’s not even a drastic change,” she promised. “Just a little darker. It’ll look good, trust me. I didn’t spend that year in cosmetology school for nothing,”

“Isn’t it a bad sign when your significant other tries to change you?” He mused out loud.

“If I were going to change you at all I’d start with your questionable personal hygiene, not your hair.”

“Woah now. Low blow. You said you liked my smell.”

“I said love Dipper smell. I don’t love Dipper stank. There’s a difference. A very musky difference.”

“Joke’s on you. It’s a part of an elaborate scheme to get you in the shower with me.”

“The joke is doubly on you. I was going to follow you into the shower, anyway. It’s part of my wifely duties to help you get this gunk out of your hair.”

Dipper snorted. They weren’t actually married of course. But they wore matching but simple gold bands on their wedding fingers. Otherwise, it’d hardly be believable that they both happened to be dating someone with the same last name.

It was a ruse that worked surprisingly well. Probably because they acted like an old married couple to begin with, and partially because they were thousands of miles away from home in a city with more than eight million people occupying it. No one questioned it.

Hiding was exhausting. They’d been sneaking and hiding their relationship for a decade. Dipper was twenty-nine, he was tired of keeping up with every white lie he had to tell to keep everything together. To top it all off he wasn’t an exquisitely horrible liar. Mabel knew all his tells, and she insisted they were all very obvious ones. Even the mere thought of someone seeing through him made him perspire.

Anonymity had been the housewarming gift New York had given them both. Walking down the streets, people sparsely looked at them, if at all. The avenues overflowed with people in their own worlds and universes, traversing to their destinations, much too wrapped up in their own stories to notice theirs.

Behind him, Mabel was wiping around the nape of his neck with a washcloth across any expanse of skin where the dye had accidentally ended up. It was relaxing, the repetitive back and forth motions, and the delicate care which she navigated around the curve of his ear, then along the nape of his neck and back up again.

Finally, she came into view once more, a few spatters of the dye on the shirt she was wearing, an old Sev’ral Timez concert tee from their reunion tour during Mabel’s sophomore year in university.

“Almost done. Sorry I made a mess of you,” she grinned and pressed the freshly damp washcloth against his forehead.

It was warm and he let his eyes flutter shut while she navigated the washcloth close to his hairline as possible, the pad of her thumb sweeping over his birthmark a few times. Goosebumps formed along the back of his neck. Dipper hadn’t realized she was finished until her lips pressed against the middle of his forehead. He would have let himself enjoy it but he was quickly distracted by Mabel trumpeting fanfare for herself with her lips, using her fingers to play out an elaborate tune. It was a cross between Reveille and the theme song to the Batman TV series that was out in the late ’60s.

“You’re my latest masterpiece. Now you just have to sit and marinate for 25 minutes and hit the showers.”

Mabel straddled his lap and Dipper groaned exaggeratedly. “You’re crushing me,” he whined, “I can’t feel my legs,” he began but quieted down a bit as her hands pressed against his bare chest.

“Shut up,” she replied. “You’re the worst.”

“Let me up, woman,” his hands reached for her legs but ended up sliding underneath the curve of her ass instead, lifting her up a few inches before she pushed herself back down onto his lap. Dipper let out an exaggerated oof sound but the added weight was heavenly. Not that he’d admit it out loud.

“No way am I letting you get out of this chair! You’re going to get that hair gook all over our beat-up furniture. I don’t wanna have to convince anyone that the weird stain on the couch is just cheap hair dye and not dried blood.”

It was a freedom he had only ever fantasized about back when everything between he and Mabel was new and burned so fiercely, a flame that multiplied as their secret became something so much more than a lie of omission.

Shit, he was glad he wasn’t seventeen anymore.

“So, what am I supposed to do trapped underneath you for 25 minutes? I can’t think of a single thing.”

His smartassery was rewarded by the sound of her boisterous laughter and her lips pressing against his. It was a comfort to know that in a city this big, some things would always feel like home. You never felt homesick when home was with you all along.


End file.
